Print-On-Demand Stores Review: DeviantArt

DeviantArt is an online community of artists. They also have a print service, which allows the artists to sell their designs, photographs, and art as prints and other products. The Print Store is an online store model known as a print-on-demand store. What this means is that artists and photographers can upload their images to DeviantArt, and sell products with their designs. Print-on-demand stores typically sell prints, home decor products, and other gifts. These stores allow designers to sell products with their images without having to worry about maintaining inventory, handling orders, and shipping, while still being able to make money off of their designs.

This article will discuss the DeviantArt Print Store service and give information about the store for sellers (as opposed to customers). The topics covered are products offered, uploading interface, the dashboard, royalty rates, membership fees, promotional tools and more.

About

DeviantArt was founded in 2000 in California, United States. They are the largest art community on the internet, and offer the ability to sell prints and merchandise of your artwork since 2006.

For the purpose of this article, I will concentrate only on their print service.

Products

They offer art prints, canvas prints, greeting cards, postcards, mousepads, coasters, magnets, mugs, and calendars. They have not added any new products in many years. Unlike most print-on-demand stores, they do not offer clothing.

Seller Interface

Very easy to use, when you upload the image to your gallery you have the option to sell it as a print. The image is placed on all products at once. If you need to, you can upload a higher resolution image for each product individually. The image file is able to be changed even after a product is published.

Affiliate/Referral Program

As far as I can tell, DeviantArt does not offer an affiliate program.

Product Statistics

There are statistics for views for the image itself, but as far as the print shop, I do not see that they offer view statistics. For sales statistics, this can be accessed through your Account Earnings page, sorted by Type.

Royalty

Regular users can only get the default royalty which is 20%. Premium (core) members can set their own royalty.

Membership Fees

Membership is free, but there is a core (premium) membership option which comes with some benefits, a few being able to set your own royalty and being able to buy your own prints at cost. Core membership is about $50 per year and comes with other benefits.

Promotional Tools

None that I can tell.

Storefront Layout

Not able to be customized, at all.

Community

DeviantArt is primarily an artist community; I will not go into detail about that here.

File Size Limits and Types

30MB is the file size limit per file, and they accept JPG and PNG files.

Conclusion

DeviantArt is a great online community, but I have had limited success with their prints store. I think it is a nice added bonus if you have an account with them. I do not know if other members on DeviantArt have had much success with their print stores, so I cannot speak for everyone.

I think the primary problem has to do with visibility. The majority of people that will see your art are the other Deviants, and few of them are likely to purchase a print. Also, very few people are promoted in the Store section of the main website. Hundreds of people have prints available, but they only highlight less than 10 on the front page, and these people are never rotated out.

About This Blog

Welcome to the blog for Psychedelic Zen. In this blog are featured articles written by the artist, Rebecca Wang. These articles are on a variety of topics involving art, ranging from news about her recent art pieces, artwork in progress, featured products from her many online stores, and opinion articles about the art world.